


You Could At Least Remember Me

by tuesdaymidnight



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Character Study, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Natasha Feels, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Steve Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-10 23:41:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7013218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesdaymidnight/pseuds/tuesdaymidnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky Barnes comes out of stasis with his HYDRA programming out, his memories in tact, and a massive identity crisis. During all his time as The Winter Soldier, his memories of Natalia are the strongest. She loved him once, and now as he tries to sort himself out, he can't stop wondering if she could love him again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Could At Least Remember Me

**Author's Note:**

> This is a self-indulgent fic about what I want to happen after Civil War. This is unbeta’ed because I’m pretty sure no one wants to read 5K+ of my Bucky/Nat MCU head canon. 
> 
> I’m going with MCU Bucky’s birthday for the sake of a throw away line about Woodrow Wilson. And James is a derivative of Jacob, the Russian equivalent would be Яков, which is where that whole bit comes from. Also, it's my personal head canon that Natasha Romanoff has a sweet tooth. She just does.

He felt it, whatever the Wakandans were doing in his brain. It didn’t hurt. That was what he noticed the most. It didn’t hurt at all, at least not physically. He was aware through the whole process, like his brain was being rewired, reconnected, from the inside.

He could feel memories, the fuzzy ones that never quite felt right, being taken out. He wasn’t really recollecting any of them during the procedure, but there was a vague sensation in the front of his brain, the part where the higher memory functions were processed. The part HYDRA had tried to disconnect from the rest.

When he woke up, the first thing he saw was Steve’s face, standing tentatively a few feet from the stasis tube. He looked terrible, like he hadn’t slept since Bucky went under--the idiot, he probably hadn’t.

“Buck?” the accompanying voice was foggy.

“Natalia,” Bucky managed to croak out. Then he blacked out.

The next time he woke up, he was in a bed--not a hospital bed, a real bed. From what he could see around him, it looked more like a hotel room than a hospital room. Wherever it was, without exaggeration, it was the most comfortable place he had ever slept in his entire life. He grew up poor, he went to war, then he spent the next 70 years standing up.

Steve was sitting in an arm chair in the corner. Bucky kept still so as not to wake him, instead trying to sift through his presumably clean mind.

Something didn’t feel right--like he had new memories. But at first it didn’t seem like they couldn’t have been his. It wasn’t possible, was it? He was an asset, and, yet, he had memories of autonomy. He had memories of rebellion. He had memories of joy--bittersweet, but still joy. He had memories of sex. 

He had only meant for the Wakandans to remove his programming, his triggers. He thought he had remembered everything--every kill, every assassination, every target. But when he thought about it a little more, it made sense he’d have those memories. They’d never done much to wipe what he had done well. “Successes” were praised. It was self-identity that was discouraged. 

Bucky had gotten the sense that people thought of HYDRA as monsters, evil-doers. But they were just people. That was the thing no one could ever understand. They were just people. HYDRA agents went home to families. They kicked around soccer balls with their kids even in the strongholds where he was kept. They paid bills. They drank coffee together, talked about the weather.  

They also trained him all the ways to kill someone swiftly with his bare hands. They taught him how to assemble weapons that didn’t exist during his combat training in the ‘40s. And they praised him for his “work” the way you praised a dog for bringing back the tennis ball. 

Steve understood. Underneath the squeaky clean imagine that everyone wanted to believe was Steve--he understood. He didn’t trust anyone because he knew that every single person alive, in virtue of their being human, was capable of deceit and violence.

Natalia understood, too. 

Natalia.

“You could at least remember  _ me _ ,” she had said. The frustration in her voice then was unmistakable. At the time, he was the soldier, and he assumed it was because she couldn’t bring him down. But Bucky knew that wasn’t it at all. 

“Are you going to pass out again?” He could hear Steve’s voice. 

Bucky looked over at Steve again and blinked a few times. This time he could see Steve’s face clearly. His stupid, hopeful, dopey face. 

“I think I’m good,” Bucky said, trying to sit up. 

“I was worried when you called me Natalia,” Steve said, hurrying over to the bedside. 

“I wasn’t calling  _ you _ Natalia, you egomaniac. I just…” he trailed off, looking around for some water and stalling for time. “There were some memories that came back when the programming came out.”  

“Of course they were of a woman,” Steve said as he handed him a glass of water.  

Bucky wondered if Steve was being obtuse on purpose. Steve had read his file. Steve had read all the SHIELD files. Surely he knew that Bucky had been in the Soviet Union on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. Surely he knew about the Black Widow program. With all the information that had been put on the internet, everyone knew about the history of Natalia Alianovna Romanova. Except apparently the Soviets hadn’t kept record of everything.   

Had their relationship really managed to stay out of anyone’s records?

“Not  _ any  _ woman,” Bucky said, after drinking half the glass. “You know her as Natasha.” 

Steve blinked. “She said you shot her in the Ukraine.”

“Not from that either.”

“I knew she changed her name, but she never said she knew...” 

“If it’s the same Natalia, then she hasn’t said a lot of things. They messed with her memories, too, Steve, and she trusts about as many people as you do.”

“But when I…”

“She didn’t know me as Sergeant Barnes. Or Bucky. Or a World War II vet from America. What they did to me--it was beyond the pale. Even for the people who trained Natalia. It never would have occurred to her that I had a past.”

“But she found your file. She had to have made the connection. Why didn’t she ever say anything to me? After two years of looking for you, and she never...”

“They programmed her, too. Maybe they wiped me out her mind. Or maybe she wanted to protect your feelings--you might be familiar with the concept.”

“Shut up,” Steve muttered.

“Maybe she didn’t want to deal with how fucking confusing this is. She probably didn’t think I’d ever remember, so it didn’t matter. The woman I knew was trained to ignore and internalize emotion.”

“But it’s her? It’s the same woman? You’re sure?”

“I knew her, Steve. We were together. I knew her better than anyone.” 

Bucky could see the wheels turning in Steve’s head. He could see the question he really wanted to ask.

“Yes, I knew her biblically.”

Steve whistled low. “And you remember that, too?”

“Yeah, yeah I do.”

“Sam’s going to hate you.”

“Natalia would eat Sam alive.”

Steve still looked hurt and a little stunned, but Bucky could see him plotting. He was already looking for a way they could reconcile. How Steve still stayed a hopeless romantic given everything he’d experienced was beyond Bucky.  

“I haven’t heard from her since she let us go in Leipzig, but I’m sure she’s been in contact with Clint if you--” 

“Don’t worry about it, Steve.”

“But--”

“She definitely knows where to find me if she wanted. It’s still possible she doesn’t really remember. Some of my memories still feel like dreams.” 

“You sure?”

He was. It didn’t matter to him at first. It wasn’t as if she owed him anything. He was between handlers when it happened. They had him help train the girls in the Red Room, and Natalia, well, Natalia had been different. She was smart--too smart for what they were doing to her. You could tell she knew it, that she was three steps ahead of everyone, but the tragic thing about Natalia was that she didn’t know what else to do other than take orders. 

It wasn’t so much that they had been found out, at least, Bucky didn’t think that’s what the issue was. No one cared who the Winter Soldier was sleeping with. It was beyond the realm of possibility for his handlers that he could love, and a black widow would never compromise herself in that way, so they probably didn’t think anything of it.

But they had needed the Winter Soldier for something and so they took him to a new handler with new wiping technology--an American this time, Pierce. They burst into her room and grabbed him, pulling him out of her bed. 

Jesus, no wonder she hadn’t said anything. He didn’t have a memory of saying “goodbye.”

He could still hear her voice, “You could have recognized  _ me _ .” But there wasn’t anything he could do, and what would happen anyway? 

So he stayed with Steve in Wakanda. Eventually Sam joined them from wherever it was he had been laying low.

“All deprogrammed?” 

“That’s what they tell me.”

“So how does a bowl of borscht sound right now?” Sam asked. 

“Fuck off.” 

Sam clapped him on the shoulder. It was a gesture of acceptance, but he continued to needle Bucky at every opportunity. Which, if Bucky thought about it, was probably also a gesture of acceptance. 

They stayed in Wakanda until Steve was able to secure a location for them in California near where Scott lived. Bucky knew Steve did it because he wanted Scott to be close to his daughter, but he never said so outright. He just smiled to himself whenever Scott left for one of his daddy-daughter dates. In a different world, in a different life, Steve Rogers would have been a great father.

There was enough to do, enough bad shit happening in the world that even the damn U.N. Security Council didn’t know about, so they weren’t bored with training or collecting intel.

Still, Bucky had a lot of restless nights and sleepless nights where he got up and sat out on the back porch of the house and looked out into the night. He had nightmares sometimes, but it was the actual memories that were worse. He would re-live every kill, every face, every scream. He would look in the mirror and see a monster staring back at him. 

After he punched his second mirror, Sam bought him a stack of self-help books.

“I don’t think my counseling skills cover this,” he said, serious for once. 

“So quantity over quality?” Bucky asked, looking at all the books. 

“You can’t keep punching mirrors, man. I mean, I get it, the rest of us have to look at your ugly mug all the time.”

So, after throwing a couple of them at Sam’s head in retaliation, Bucky took the books. He skimmed through them, partly out of curiosity, partly because it made Steve stop looking so damn guilty. The one that was most interesting wasn’t a self-help book, but a memoir from a girl who had been kidnapped as a kid and held captive for eight years. 

What he learned from all the books was that apparently he needed to forgive himself. He gave Steve some of the books after he finished reading them with post-it notes on the forgiveness passages. Steve didn’t think it was funny. Bucky told him that it wasn’t a joke.

Of course, none of them gave much advice for how to forgive yourself when you were physically and psychologically brainwashed. Or how to forgive yourself for, well, for whatever it was Steve felt guilty for. Probably for being born too small to join the army with your best friend in the first place. 

Steve punched things and fought bad guys to cope. 

Bucky chased after memories of Natalia’s breath on his neck and the way she would curl around him after they’d had sex, clinging to him as they slept. He’d think about how she’d always seemed comforted by his metal arm, not afraid. 

He also chain smoked. 

“Those things’ll kill you,” Scott had said the first time Bucky asked if he could bring him back a pack of Lucky Strikes from a grocery store run.

Bucky just stared at him in disbelief. Scott brought him the cigarettes. 

One night, he was sitting outside, looking up at the sky and trying to remember if he saw more stars as a kid when the door slid open. 

“Sorry, I didn’t think anyone else was up,” Wanda said, backing into the house.

“No, it’s fine. I wouldn’t mind company.”

He offered her a cigarette to be polite. She surprised him when she took it. They didn’t talk, but it was oddly calming to have her around. She wasn’t tentative around him, at least, no more tentative than she was around anyone. 

They never talked about it--how their lives, their worlds as they knew them were both destroyed. They didn’t talk about how other people were afraid of them. They definitely didn’t talk about how fucked up it made you to feel both used and a pariah. 

They watched cartoons instead. But it helped to know that she was there if he ever could verbalize the nightmarish existence he didn’t think he’d ever be able to fully reconcile into a person. 

The only time he had felt like a person the last 70 years was when he was with Natalia, but they were memories. Just like the memories he’d had of Steve. They helped a little, but he was a different person now. 

He tried really hard to put her out of his mind, to find something else to be an anchor. He knew Steve had made contact with her. He knew that she had an open invitation to their location. Bucky didn’t know exactly what Steve had told her, but, either way, she never appeared. 

The problem was that he didn’t have control over his dreams. The first dream he’d had in over 70 years--was about her. They were running down a rain-soaked cobblestone street holding hands. She was laughing. 

Except when he woke up, he realized It hadn’t been a dream. It wasn’t the warm feeling of her hand against his metal one. It was the precious sound of her laughter--a sound he was sure no one else ever heard--that made him decide he didn’t want to try to ignore it anymore. 

She was totally off the grid. Steve didn’t know her location. Clint had fairly regular contact from her, but it was always untraceable. The way he said, “Even I don’t know where she’d go,” had been meant to be reassuring. 

But there was a challenge in it, too. 

Clint knew something. There was no way that Steve would have told Clint about Bucky’s past with Natalia. Steve was close with Clint, but not that close. That could only mean that Natalia had said something to him. She  _ did  _ remember him--she remembered them.

And the way Clint said it meant that Natalia still felt something for him. Even if she was just angry, at him, at HYDRA, that was at least something. Natalia wouldn’t waste feelings on him if there wasn’t something there worth feeling. 

If he knew her as well as he thought he did, then he could find her. The problem was his memories weren’t clear enough to recall if she’d revealed some safe house, some place she would go. 

And then he remembered Egypt. 

Geography and history weren’t exactly part of the Red Room training, but Natalia always pilfered books. There was one she read over and over about Cleopatra and the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Natalia had been the jewel of the Red Room, the star pupil, but what they didn’t realize about her was that she was smart enough to dream of escape even if she couldn’t fathom how to do it. For someone like Natalia, when you were at the mercy of so many other people, the only way out was with power. 

Bucky saw the light on under Steve’s bedroom door, so he rushed into the room without knocking. Steve was in bed reading a book, but he startled at the intrusion. 

"Shit, Buck. What’s wrong?” 

“I need to go to Egypt. Can you get me a plane?”

“What?” Steve said. “Egypt? What happened?”

“Natalia. I need--she’s in Cairo. Can you help?”

“Yes, of course. Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” 

Steve looked at Bucky with a serious expression. “You’re not making sense. Do you think she’s in trouble?” 

“No, I--I just--I know she’s not going to come to me now. I have to go to her. They ripped me out of her arms, Steve. Literally. I don’t know what she suffered for it.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“I know, but I still have to be the one to bring her back.” 

Steve nodded. Bucky could see all the questions he wanted to ask written on his face. He finally settled on, “What do you want to happen?” 

“I just want to talk to her. Something Clint said--I know she remembers, Steve, and I want to know why she didn’t say anything. I want to know what happened after they took me from her. I want to know if there’s any hope of, I don’t know, something.”

“And you barged into my room for ‘something’? I could have been whacking off in here, you know.” 

“Stevie, if I had a dime for every time I heard you spanking it under your blankets when you thought you were being quiet, I’d be richer than Stark.”

Steve snorted. “You got those memories back, too, then?” 

“All of them,” Bucky said, failing to sound light-hearted.

Steve held his gaze a minute. “I’ve never seen you like this about a girl before,” Steve said. 

Bucky shook his head. “It’s not just about a girl. It’s--she knew me when I was a monster, and she loved me anyway. She won’t--she’ll accept me as is.”

Bucky hoped Steve didn’t take offense to the implication. Steve wanted his old friend back, and those parts of Bucky were still inside him, but he was more than that now. He knew Steve accepted him insofar as he could, but reading about the Winter Soldier in a file was different from knowing the Winter Soldier.

Steve did help Bucky with the plane, though. There was a SHIELD safe house in Cairo, and Bucky was able to hitch a ride with a group that was headed there. He sat apart from them on the plane. Steve assured him that they were on their side, that no one on board would rat him out to the government because they were running rogue operations, too. But Bucky still didn’t trust them. 

He definitely didn’t take them up on their offer to stay at the safe house, but he did go there with them to learn the location. He knew that Natalia would want to keep an eye on it, so he hopped on roof and combed the area. 

Even hidden under a headscarf and a loose dress, Bucky could easily pick Natalia out of a crowd simply by the way she moved. It was in the way she carried her body with so much confidence and trust that it would do whatever she wanted it to. He ached to touch it, to touch her.

Once he figured out which hotel room was hers, it was simple enough to slip in through the window, left open as if in invitation.

“So, you found me,” she said without turning around.

“No,” he replied. “I remembered. I remembered everything, Natalia.” 

She spun around. For a split second, she was the Natalia he knew, the top trainee of the Black Widow program, the young woman who had the instructors wrapped around her finger without them even realizing it. She looked the way she did right before she leapt into his arms. Part of him, the Soldier part, wanted to run toward her, lift her up so she could wrap her legs around him. But the part of him that was still Bucky held back.

She looked to be fighting a similar battle herself. 

“I’m not that person anymore. I’m not that girl,” she said quietly. “I’m still not quite sure what was real and what was me just wanting it to be real.”

“It was real,” Bucky replied. “Natalia, it was good. It was so good.”

“But we don’t get to have good. We don’t get to keep good,” she said.  

“It’s different this time. We’re a hell of a lot more free than we used to be. No mind erasing. No handlers. There’s no one who can tear us apart anymore.” 

“But there are,” she insisted.

“Yeah, but we have the most stubborn super soldier in the world on our side now.” 

The corners of Natalia’s mouth twitched up, but quickly turned down to a frown. 

“Clint, well, and Laura sort of, were the only friends I had in the world until I met Steve. And Steve--I don’t know if he really trusts me, especially now. Good doesn’t last,” she said. 

“He trusts you. Jesus, he trusts me for some stupid reason, and I’m a murderer. I tried to kill him--multiple times.”

“Well, I have more kills than you,” Natalia said. “A lot more.”  

“Steve was always shit at math anyway,” Bucky said, aiming for levity.  

“Do you remember when you told me to call you Yakov?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Bucky said, recalling the memory with a twist in his gut.

“Did you know where that came from? Or did you just choose it randomly?”

“It just felt right,” he said. “I didn’t know I was a person before. I just figured I was raised, trained, the way the girls were. And you all had names.”

Natalia didn’t respond right away, and Bucky could see her eyes starting to tear up. 

“I want to hate HYDRA. I want to hate the Winter Soldier,” he continued. “But I can’t. For one, it’s who I am just as much as I am James Buchanan Barnes. For another, it brought me to you.” 

“Yakov,” she whispered. “It’s not--” 

“I’m different, too, you know. It got worse. What they did to you, what they did to us, where they took me, it was worse after they took me from you. And now I know who I am, but at the same time I don’t know who I’m supposed to be.”

“And that’s exactly why we shouldn’t--”

“But I know I loved you. And I know I never loved anyone else like that. I know you quieted the ghosts that haunted me back then. I know that even when they ripped me out of your arms, even when they wiped me and gave me away, there was a part of you still in me. I could have killed you in the Ukraine, but I knew I shouldn’t.”

She gasped. “Is that why? I always wondered. The Winter Soldier didn’t miss.” 

“It wasn’t a clear memory, but on some fundamental level, deep inside me, I knew I couldn’t kill you.”

“How fucked up is it that that’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me?” 

“I brought you flowers once,” Bucky said. 

“You stole them.” 

“They didn’t give me access to the HYDRA expense account.” 

Natalia smiled. “Those jokes make Steve uncomfortable?”

“Yeah. Yeah, he doesn’t think brainwashing or murder are very funny.” 

“He needs you. He puts on a brave face, but he needs to reminisce about Coney Island and the Dodgers and Woodrow Wilson.”

“Steve was way too young to remember Wilson’s presidency. He died when I was, like, 6.”

“I’m Russian. I don’t care about Woodrow Wilson. I just--you’re not who I knew you to be. When I found out that Steve Rogers’ best friend was my--I didn’t blame you, I blamed them. But I also couldn’t help but think that you never would have wanted--”

“The ‘what ifs’ will kill you, Natalia. I can’t go back to being just Bucky. I’m not that guy anymore, and I never will be. The version of me I am now is a lot closer to the version of me that was with you, and I think maybe I can learn to like this version. But I think I want you to help me do that.” 

“I’ve pushed that part of me down so much. I locked it away. I never--love was a risk. I don’t know if I can let that part of me out again.”

“But if you could, do you want to?” he asked. 

Her mask was gone. Even if she said no, he was grateful she would still let her guard down for him. There was still a part of her that only he knew. Just like the memories of Coney Island, of Christmas morning with his sisters when he was a kid, of sitting on a fire escape in Brooklyn with Steve in the middle of the summer--there were a handful of things in his mind that were still only his.

“Yes,” she finally said.

His heart started racing with a feeling that had been dormant for so long it almost made his knees buckle.

“So where does that leave us?” he asked, his voice as unsteady as his heart.

“I don’t know,” Natalia said.  

She came back to California with him. She wouldn’t move in with the rest of them. Communal living was what she had known her whole life until she defected, and now she couldn’t stand it anymore. But it turned out she had a safe house in San Francisco--a loft that once belonged to an old friend, she said. 

It took a little bit of convincing, but with the help of some needling from Sam and Steve, she let him take her out on a date a few weeks after she got back, or what qualified as a date when you were trying to live off the radar of every intelligence agency in the world. 

He rode into the city and picked her up on his motorcycle. He could have borrowed Steve’s car, but the memory was too strong of her arms wrapped around him, holding onto him tightly, grounding him. 

Of course, she looked unimpressed by the bike until he shut it off and tossed her the key.

“Want to drive?” 

“You serious?” 

“Just watch the clutch--it sticks a little.”

He gave her the directions and then waited for her to start the motorcycle before he climbed on behind her. He held onto her hips loosely for balance, desperately wanting to hold on tighter, relearn the way her body felt everywhere under his hands. 

She was an expert rider--even in heels and a dress. His added weight didn’t throw her off in the slightest, even as she blew every speed limit out of the water. 

Their destination was an apple orchard not too far outside of San Francisco. A very understanding, very discreet friend of Scott’s owned it. Bucky didn’t ask any questions. 

After she parked the bike, Bucky led her out through a few rows of trees to a clearing. The blanket he had spread out earlier was still there, as was the cooler. 

“You actually planned this out,” she said. 

“Of course I did. Who do you take me for?”

“You act like such a man-child around Steve and Sam, I couldn’t be too sure.”

“I don’t--” he started to protest, but she was right. 

He started pulling out containers of food--things Natalia liked but didn’t admit to having a preference for, ridiculously expensive cheeses, three kinds of olives. He had even made her favorite dessert.

“Did you make me Rice Krispie Treats?” she asked gleefully when she saw the plate.

“I’ve thought they were disgusting since 1939, but, yes, they’re all yours.” 

“I take back my man-child comment. This is romantic, Yakov.” 

She ignored the rest of the food and reached for a Rice Krispie Treat.

“More romantic than stolen flowers?” he asked. 

She bit her lip and looked at him fondly. “Maybe less romantic than not killing me, but it’s a start.”

They ate and drank a bottle of wine and talked, mostly about frivolous things. They seemed to tacitly agree that the past was off limits on a date, that they were trying to start something new. But then she mentioned something about Wanda’s progress, and he couldn’t help but think of his own recovery. 

“You gave me hope,” Bucky blurted out. “Even when I couldn’t remember you, there was still a tiny piece of hope that I tucked away, that somehow they could never wipe from me.”

The mood shifted. It might have been their first real date, but there was no use pretending that there wasn’t always already a spark between them, that they didn’t already know each other intimately. Natalia was still cautious, protective of her heart, but Bucky was already hopelessly in love again, which was both exhilarating and terrifying.

“I’m going to have to be the one to make the move, aren’t I?” she asked.

“I found you in Egypt,” he said.

She shook her head fondly and then moved. She wasn’t tentative at all as she climbed on his lap, leaning down to kiss him. His memories were nothing like the real thing, nothing like the actual weight of her body on top of him, the softness of her lips, her scent and her taste filling up his senses until there wasn’t anything else. 

They didn’t go slow. There was no point in slow, not when they both knew how quickly it could all be taken away. 

His body shook when he pushed inside her the first time. He had forgotten it--the thing that memory couldn’t ever really capture. He closed his eyes, just feeling warmth and softness and Natalia.

He only opened his eyes when he felt her hand on his face. 

“You still with me?” she asked. 

There weren’t words to answer her, so he kissed her again, fiercely, trying to devour her as he started to thrust in and out of her willing body.

When they were spent, they lay side-by-side on the blanket, completely naked with the sun drawing patterns on their skin.

“Where do you go?” Bucky asked. “What do you do when you disappear?”

“Usually I work,” she said. 

“You work?”

He asked, but by “work,” he knew what she meant. Natalia Romanova wasn’t filling out W-9 forms or doing spy work for the NSA.

“I have a certain skill set. Same one you have. And I need to make a living somehow. I still have to pay rent, eat, buy clothes, buy guns.”

“But you wanted to sign that deal with the U.N.”

“I still think it would have been better for Steve and Tony if they had agreed, one way or the other. But I was thinking about myself. I don’t have super powers. I’m dangerous because I’m dangerous. I’ve been letting people use me since I before I can remember.”

Bucky understood. Once you had that mindset, you accepted it as a fact of life. It was the fundamental difference between Natalia and Steve. Steve instinctively rebelled against anyone trying to control him. To Natalia, that was just how the world worked--until you were Cleopatra, you were just a pawn. 

“Anyway, I do the kind of work that people on the U.N. security council pay me under the table to do because they would never have The Avengers do it. Also, I have a few scores to settle on my own. Once the Iron Curtain fell, a lot of bad people relocated, found new hiding places. I actually just tracked down one of the worst ones down. ”

“Need any help?” Bucky asked.

“You really think that’s a good idea? You show up anywhere where there are weapons being fired, and you’ll be put down like a dog.” 

She didn’t mean it to be insulting. Bucky had been absolved of Zemo’s crime, but he wasn’t exactly an innocent party. The fact that Tony hadn’t pressed charges for his parents’ murder had helped his public image considerably, but if someone recognized him, he didn’t think there was a government in the world that wouldn’t use a flimsy excuse to bring him in for questioning. 

“I can drive a getaway car,” Bucky offered. 

What he didn’t say was that he was desperate to be around her. But she seemed to sense it anyway. 

“What about a getaway boat?” she asked. 

“They didn’t have a lot of boats in Siberia, but I can learn.”

The man Natalia had tracked down had managed to exist without a nationality for 25 years. He existed on a converted aircraft carrier in international waters. By any official definition, he was a pirate. But he plundered from bank accounts and raided commercial shipping vessels with a huge amount of success. But when Natalia knew him, he had been buying girls out of the Red Room to sell to sex traffickers. 

He got lazy, moved too close to Ecuador that he could be reached with an offshore sport fishing boat. Bucky didn’t even need to provide backup. He didn’t know how many there were on the boat, but Natalia reappeared after a cool 20 minutes during which he had counted the sound of three controlled explosions. 

“Done?” he asked.

“He never saw it coming,” she said, smiling. He loved he danger in that smile.

“Now what?” Bucky asked. 

Natalia shrugged. “Lie low, just in case.”

They took the boat back and then hopped on a flight to the closest island, which happened to be San Cristóbal. Bucky had never been to the Galápagos. Natalia hadn’t either. When they stepped outside of the small airport and looked around at the exotic setting, Bucky felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time. It was the experience of something new, without the accompanying dread and misery that had followed him since he escaped HYDRA. 

“We could make a new memory,” Natalia said so quietly that Bucky almost didn’t hear her. “I don’t have anywhere I need to be for a while.” 

“I kind of stand out. Guy on a beach with a metal arm.” 

“We can get a private spot at one of these resorts.” 

“Or we can just stay in bed,” Bucky suggested with an exaggerated wink.

“I like the way you think.”  

They barely got out of bed the first 24 hours. It was hard to talk about the past, and with their positions in the world still perilous, it was also hard to talk about the future. And feelings were neither of their strong suits. But sex--sex was a language they both spoke. Their bodies said what their voices couldn’t.

Bucky had to re-learn the ways she liked to be touched, how to coax a second orgasm out of her. It was familiar, but it was also new. This time Bucky was allowed to feel joy, wonder, without risking anything other than his heart. But he trusted Natalia with that.

Eventually, they ventured outside their room. They waited until after dark to go out onto the beach. Even in long sleeves, Bucky still stood out. They both did.

Under the light of the moon nothing looked quite real. Bucky didn’t believe in paradise, in peace. There would always be a threat of danger; there would always be bad guys. But there on a tropical beach, hand-in-hand with Natalia, he could temporarily forget.  

“What if we never go back?” Natalia asked, half-joking, but partly serious, too.

“Then we don’t go back,” Bucky replied.

_ Fin _

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [tumblr](http://tuesdaymidnight.tumblr.com) or [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/tuesdaymidnight) so we can cry about Sebastian Stan together.


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